Mobile computing devices (e.g., Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), phones, laptops, tablet computers, and the like) are becoming increasingly popular. Further, many customers of wireless network providers connect to the wireless networks using multiple computing devices. In many cases, the providers struggle to maintain an infrastructure that can keep up with demand for bandwidth. One of the primary bottlenecks for providing the requested data to a mobile device is the wireless connection between the device and an antenna. Where high-speed wire-based communication networks are plentiful (e.g., fiber optic cable), the bandwidth needed to relay the request from a wireless access point to a WAN (e.g., the Internet) is plentiful. Accordingly, the ability to service a request made by a mobile device may be limited by the connection speed of the wireless communication channel. Where infrastructure has not kept up with demand, the download speed for each mobile may be lowered as more and more mobile devices compete for limited bandwidth in the wireless communication channel. Many customers, however, select which wireless network provider to subscribe to based on their download speeds. A wireless network provider with lower speeds may look less attractive to potential customers.
Because many customers demand that mobile devices be light, inexpensive, and portable, the memory (e.g., RAM or L1/L2 caches) of some mobile devices is limited when compared to the memory of other user computing devices such as desktop computers or even laptop computers. Accordingly, many mobile devices do not offer the same ability to cache large amounts of data in memory as other computing devices. This limitation prevents wireless network providers from pre-caching (or pre-fetching) large amounts of data on the mobile devices.